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If 2020 was the Year of Taking Notes, then 2021 is turning into the year of handwriting notes. And if you know me this is quite a change – I have been proudly typing things out for years, leaving writing things by hand proudly behind. A big part of it …

The idea of the new house started when we moved into the old one. It was a concept, an idea that we joked about. "Well in our next house we want… "" and then we would chuckle. I mean there were things that we didn’t like and so we changed …

It was a long time ago when I first discovered Sudoku. I do remember it well… I had a long flight ahead of me and this was before I had a smart phone..I had some books (like printed) but wanted something else in case the books made me lose …

TL;DR – rclone truly is the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage and you should look into it if you have to deal with that world at all (S3, DropBox, OneDrive, etc).

In the past I really had an addiction to Humble Bundle, where I bought a lot of cheap …

Been thinking a lot lately of the current state of video games.. I'm not sure why. Technically, we own an XBox One but my son plays on it mostly (or, er, most of the time) and I've dabbled a bit in other games, specifically Minecraft and Stardew Valley, which in …

As this crazy year closes, my wife and I were chuckling about how many TV Series we binged while in isolation. We started more than we finished – if one us is isn't totally into it, we have no problems in stopping. These are the ones we liked the best. This …

It was funny – the day after I finally put up a blog post I got an email from Webfaction that my account was closed. That was funny. I mean I knew they were migrating sites and I had a couple of old Django playgrounds on there, plus my person blog …

Hey it's December and it's my second blog of 2020. Almost a year since my last update. Let's not talk about the strange year of 2020… sometimes I do an unintentional Big Thing(tm) for me, learning-wise or tech-wise of the year. A few weeks ago I figured out what …

This year I've discovered the blog Uses This and I'm fascinated by it. Since I will never be on there, I decided to roll my own. As I started thinking about it, I realized that I kinda have something like it, at least describing my current development environment so maybe …

Kasim Tuman recently wrote that Emacs is like a workbench. It evolves as you get better with your work – or changes as your works changes. I think that is a great metaphor of not just Emacs, but software development tools in general. So this post is about my evolving workbench …

For several months, I've been converting a few of my dotfiles into OrgMode files and using tangling to generate the config file and the same file generates HTML documentation. The point was to always publish them – and I finally have. See the HTML version or the github project. Note that …

It's funny as I have hit solidly middle age, when you figure things about yourself that have always been there – but you have just noted it. I can list quite a few things – both positive and negative. But what the one I have just simply noticed is music.

This should …

I'm not sure how many other people remember Nextel but I do, maybe because my first job out of college used them a lot. They had one really cool feature on their phones – a walkit-talkie like functionality. You could hold a button and talk, and people on your list of …

I've gotten back to blogs again. And that meant I needed an RSS Reader. The qualifications:

• web-based but have an Android app
• interface gets out of my way to read an article
• favorite support
• syncs often
• still under active development
• ability to pay a reasonable price for the service (because …

In an odd series of events, we played our Wii again for the first time in years. We had a lot of fun bowling and my son discovered how hard Wii golf can really be, but then he cleaned us up on the tennis court. He was a baby in …

Somehow, by accident, 2018 has become the year of Emacs. I did write about some Emacs improvements I was doing, but it seems to be something I have come back to time after time. My latest work project is a large, mostly-standard Java app with some Spring sprinkled in here …

Lots of little ideas in my head that don't seem to make up a good post for each one, so I'm putting them into on. Be prepared for utter chaos.

• I read about a compact microtool on the Cool Tools blog and I had misplaced my (larger) Leatherman I carried …

Some things on editing I found this weekend:

• EDITOR vs VISUAL . I didn't know there was a difference between the environment variables EDITOR and VISUAL and I always set the former. But I was way wrong. There seems little point in setting EDITOR unless you still work inside serial connections …

https://i.imgur.com/Sh7r8I4.jpg

I started brewing beer over a year ago and, for some reason, I haven't blogged about it. Which is funny, since beer and homebrewing have become popular keywords for my web searches over the past year. And, yes, that pic above is one of …

I've failed to blog about one of my more geeky things I've done in the past year – setup a RetroPie. Note that it's not Retro/Pi/ because you can install it on more things than a RasberryPi… though that is exactly what I did.

For the 2016-17 school year, my …

I've been trying to improve my emacs-fu for the past while. It was probably 18 months ago I declared bankruptcy on my duct-tape and bailing wire Emacs config and started fresh with Projectile and haven't regretted it for a second. I started reading the Emacs Reddit, which introduced me to …

I spend a lot of my day online. Searching for solutions for projects, restaurants, advice, etc. Online forums, restaurant review sites, and many other places … my browser history is big every day. Sometimes I get a little disturbed by how often my searches show up in ads showing to me …

As I write this I'm in the middle of a break from Facebook. At this point, there is little reason for me to ever get back.

First – I'm not sure it's public knowledge that there is a way to simply disable your account on FB. You sorta disappear…. people can't …

I think it's cool when Jason Kottke does it so why not do it too?

• Guardians of the Galaxy (the first one) – My daughter was recently sick on a Sunday and we watched this together. It was my third time and her first. It really holds up well. Still my …

A few months ago I was going through various backups and online file storage places I have (and they seem legion) and noted that I had music files everywhere. Some dated back to my late days of college (just before Napster was a thing) up to much more recent downloads …

We had to get a new printer this week. I was able to get it to talk and print from not one, not two, but three different devices in my house on the first try. Either printing is getting better or easier, or the anti-printing coalition forces aren't working against …

Over the years I've had a lot of cheap Android tablets. I started with a Hisense Sero Pro 7, which was actually a good tablet until it decided to stop charging. I then started using my daughter's old (and no longer used by her Nexus 7), which also stopped charging …

I wanted to do some changes around here and then got caught. I wanted to blog more but I didn't want to support any of the old blog. So i ripped the band-aid off, grabbed very few recent posts and then left 12 years of blog posts over there.

So …

My Android phone has been weird lately and in the midst of troubleshooting it, I did a factory reset to figure out if that would fix it (it didn't). After the reset I installed very few apps because I wanted to narrow it down. Now that I have done that …

My wife got my a little beginner home-brew kit for a late Christmas present. I was delighted and started the fermentation process that night.

As week later, I took a small sample from the fermenter and was excited by the result after such a short time. I gave a little …